We're Bound to Linger On
by oftimeandspace
Summary: A non-linear love story.


_Godlike lovers, we would hang_

_Beyond the cosmos whose Big Bang,_

_All the mad millennia past,_

_Was but a popgun to our slow blast_

There are wonders contained in the dark spaces between her outstretched fingers, jumbled up syllables about _this is how much I love you_ and _I would hand you a nameless star and name it anew for you each morning _and _yes&us&_, all caught in the infinitesimal cracks in her pink nail varnish and the featherlight glide of her fingers across his.

She opens the TARDIS door wide and turns to look at him over the peak of her shoulder, the cosmos spiraling out behind her.

"Reckon we'll make it everywhere one day?" she asks, and he looks at her and the tiny insignificance of the universe behind her, stars and galaxies and planets upon planets overshadowed by a laughing girl named Rose Tyler.

"Yes," he tells her, and flesh and bone and hearts together they watch the reflections of long-dead stars scattered across the universe before them.

---

Sprinting across a field of waving summer grasses yellow and ripe and shining in the early morning sunlight, Rose trips and lands hard on her knees, accidentally tugging the Doctor down with her. They land in a tangle of limbs and exclamations and clothes, his coat wrapping around one of her legs, her hoodie catching like a parody of a lover's embrace around the point of his right elbow.

Her new jeans are ruined, covered in mud and smeared bits of grass, and the Doctor has an angry red welt rising on the inside of a pale freckled wrist, and Rose says, "Guess it's good we weren't really trying to escape anyone?" and starts giggling at the shocked look on the Doctor's face beside hers.

He rolls over, sliding his arm down her side, fingers sinking into the soil below them, just close enough to the warmth of her hip to feel the rasp of her denim jeans with the back of his thumb. "Don't even know why I keep you around, honestly, the way you run," and he traps her giggles with the press of his mouth against hers.

It is 79A.D.; somewhere in a place that will one day be called Italy a volcano is exploding, marking a small moment of time and making it something _more_.

(They live without textbooks.)

---

On Beataline 9 Rose says, "I think it's my birthday back home today. Or is it tomorrow?" Linear and non-linear tangles; thinking about them makes a point above the arch of her left eyebrow ache and so she generally ignores the details of the thing, leaving the messier parts for the Doctor to sort out.

Later he takes her to the highest point on the planet, a desolate sweep of teal grass. They watch the twin moons rise in the dark sky, emitting a pinkish glow that makes the valley of lights below them glitter like fairy lights.

On what is actually her 21st birthday she wakes with a crick in her neck and the weight of the Doctor's head pressing into the bend of her right knee, making her lower leg completely numb, so the Doctor gives her a piggyback ride back to the TARDIS, singing an off-key Martian variation of the birthday song while she taps his shoulders along with the beat.

She wishes for forever, twenty-one imaginary candles flickering in her imagination as she builds dreams and adventures and stories out of the birthdays stretching out before them.

---

He never says _I love you_.

Later, after a white room and a dot on a creased copy of an atlas of Norway, she will wake from a dream in which the Doctor leans his knee against hers, their hands almost not quite touching on the ground between them, a dream in which he says _the words lie_.

Still.

Some days she misses the way he said _Rose_, the way it was home and love and us wrapped up in a flowery name her mum gave her on a whim.

---

He was a new man, he is a new man, and he will become another, someone wearing a stranger's face and using new words that this familiar throat of his will never utter.

He waits, this stretched out thin end of him, propped up against a battered door on a council estate he hasn't seen in 2.3 linear Earth years.

Across the courtyard a door bangs open, emitting the blurred forms of a young girl and a not so young woman.

He burns, he burns, cells changing and time screaming in his ears, and a girl shivering in a thin hoodie grins at him, unknowing of her future, his future, of anything beyond this moment caught between them.

---

Rose Tyler waits for the bus to take her to her interview, uncomfortable and stiff in the dress pants and boots she borrowed from Shareen. A bus turns the corner and she starts forward automatically, already digging through her purse for the correct change for the fare. The bus comes to a stop in front of her with a screech of worn brakes and she steps forward, heel crunching something on the sidewalk. She shakes her leg, trying to dislodge it, while the bus driver tuts and mutters about time schedules.

"Sorry, mate," she mumbles, leaning down to rip the paper free and jog up the bus's steps. The bus's doors slide closed behind her, barely missing the back of her purse, and she hurriedly deposits her money and swings herself into the first empty seat she sees.

She smoothes the crumpled flyer out on her lap to see what it says, but is interrupted by the beep of her mobile receiving a new text message, something from Mickey about trivia night down the local pub.

She calls him back, leaning her forehead against the cool glass of the window, and says, "Yeah, I'll be done at Henrick's by then, so save me a seat."

Mickey tells her about the shop and the new cars he's working on, and she hums and sighs and laughs at the funny bits, and happens to glance down at the flyer once.

_and then the big bad wolf said_ she reads, realizes it's just some preschool story, and crumples it up and tosses it into the bottom of her purse just in time to tell Mickey she's at her stop and she has to go.

Weeks later she finds it among the half-used tubes of chapstick and old pub receipts littering the bottom of her purse, and throws it out without even glancing at it.

---

Somewhere a young girl in a pink dress and mismatched socks accepts a blue balloon from a man in a bowtie.

This is a beginning.


End file.
